Bug Description

Previously the Home lens searched a "local" context on one's personal computer. The shopping lens, and other lenses leverage online searches to provide additional potentially relevant results, but in cases where they integrate with the home lens they violate the expectation of privacy established by the previous local search context. They also violate the expectation of privacy that one associated with a "home".

This could be resolved by introducing the concept of a "world" lens in addition to a home lens, and a switch to select which is the default search performed in the Dash. The "world lens" would provide online results, whereas the home lens would always perform local searches.

The above statement should be considered by all developers when using the consumer (me) as a source of income, directly or indirectly. That is the reason why nearly every website has a [link to a] privacy disclaimer on every page.

Disclosure provides me with the onus and opportunity to make a choice, to search or not to search. By searching _after_ disclosure I am providing you with my concent to send my data elsewhere.

Without such disclosure (let alone some way of opting out) this to me would make Ubuntu equivalent to the malware infested versions of Windows being sold in China. The fact that this was deliberatly done in the place designed for the user to search most often just makes it worse.

Minimum solution, a permanent disclosure on the Homes Lens that "Your search data will be sent to online to interested third-parties".

Preferred solution, a separate Shopping Lens that has implicit and explicit user concent per search. Additionally there may be a "Shop for Results Online" or "See Shopping results" link in the Home and other lenses that will open up the Shopping Lens with the same search. Then, and only then, would the search data be sent online.

I would further add that not adhering to the suggestions above could potentially result in liability with respect to various personal data protection rules/legislation from around the world. PIPEDA (Canada), COPPA (American children), Data Protection Directive (in the EU) etc.

Seriously, getting both profit for Canonical and easy shopping searches for the user (me) seems like a no-brainer to me. BUT, you have to adhere to data protection measures and give people the choice to use it or not. Thus, scrapping the whole lens completely is a bad idea.
I agree with MikhailValerie in comment #2, there simply has to be a disclosure and an opt-out opportunity as simple as a click on "No, thanks". While I don't have particular concerns about having the results in the main dash, a special shopping lens would in deed be nice, and from an GUI point of view easier to extend.
I might add, that an opt-in during the installation procedure or the first start of Unity would be more appropriate.

This isn't a dupe of Bug #1054741, which addresses the privacy policy update. This is about bad ui that establishes an expectation of the kind of privacy one has in a "home", but then sends search queries to the world. The UI needs to make clear delineation between those 2 contexts.

I've updated the description to make this differentiation clearer, and to propose a specific solution with a UI mockup.

Create an local offline search only lens, use the home icon for that lens.
The video lens behaves different too, but in a way better, when searching it clearly shows `online' results as disctinct,
with icon and text.

There are a lot of different bug files and people involved with this and simular bugs, i think its time to get them together and work towards an decent solution.

Full control over what lenses and scopes can do, and control over where they are shown and an easy to way to re-order them.
Add an local-home-lens ( that you can choose to install ) with local search only. ( instead of apt-get remove shopping-lens ).

Changed status back to confirmed. A feature-request is not the same as an opinion. This report is a feature-request, but it's not an opinion.

This is the third time that folks have fiddled with the metadata on this ticket. I can only assume this is an effort to get old tickets from the lens debacle out of triage queues, which is understandable. If that's he goal, the correct status is "wontfix". As the reporter, I continue to hope this request will be implemented, so I'm not going to set it to that status. In the absence of a wontfix decision, this is a well-defined specific feature-request that has been confirmed and its status should reflect that.

Ugh, apparently feature-request is the same as opinion. If you reset per those guidelines I won't revert the status again.

This bug is one of many bugs filed during the lens debacle of 2012. Most of those bugs have been variously ignored, mischaracterized, and abused as Canonical ignored community feedback and plowed forward with a truly awful search scheme. In that context, it's not pleasant to see the bug marked as "opinion"... but it does seem to be the correct classification for a feature-request.

At its core this is an ethical question that might become a legal issue, as i warned about it before.
If persisted it can have an effect of the trust in ubuntu as a ecosystem and in the end will cost money instead of the benefits it might bring right now.

The definition of Status opinion is:
This means there is a difference of opinion around the report and people are free to continue the discussion, but the project or package maintainers need to move to other work and are considering the issue closed. The idea is that reports can be marked closed, so developers aren't wasting time on them, but discussion can still be on-going.

Here there isn't a difference of opinion. We don't want the issue closed and we think the developers should waste time on them.
But it's a feature request...